Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Ooh, the first footage of the expansion for my favourite game of last year, the Heroes of Might’n'Magicky King’s Bounty: The Legend. So far, all we knew was it featured an impractically-dressed female hero, a grown-up version of the parent game’s Princess Amelie, a pet dragon, a pegasus and a race of angry anteater types. Can’t say I feel terribly threatened by anteaters, but presumably their master plan involves more than mass insect ingestion. A pair of new videos show the game off rather better, and while editing can often achieve miracles, they do rather suggest we’re in for a bigger, grander experience than the crawl’n'grind of KB’s latter half. Many bosses, many ultra-powers and the option to fly across the map should make it a leaner affair.
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This is about as simple as games get: Super Jail Escaper was made by the splendid Jan Willem Nijman in fifteen minutes. You have to dodge the searchlights. And it’s peculiarly compulsive. The music completes it, I think. Can anyone beat 200 75,000 metres? (Not really.) Pick it up at The Poppenkast.

News of another free week of Crysis Wars has turned up over on the community forums, and BigDownload reckon it’s from April 9th. Word is that the official community portal – the existential-sounding MyCrysis.com – will have details on how to get in on the free week from Monday. (And Crysis Wars, in case you were wondering, is the multiplayer aspect of Crysis: Warhead. In it everyone gets the super nano-suits, and can do each other harm with MAXIMUM-strength, vehicular escalation, and cloaker-sneaking goodness. It’s actually a bit of a laugh, although not one of my all time favourites for online FPS.)

Intel send word that this year’s Level Up development competition is up and running. Or “Level Up 2009, the Intel Visual Adrenaline Game Demo Challenge,” as they call it. There’s three categories, including, er, optimised for Intel Graphics, and “Best Threaded Game”. Anyway, Intel supply a load of the development tools for nowt, and the prizes are pretty enormous, including a US$4,000 PC, with a similar amount of development software, and free GDC passes for the winner. All good stuff for aspiring indies. The basic FAQ is here, and the more detailed information doc is here. Probably worth signing up if you’re into that sort of cleverness.

Do we care about the story of ultra-death freeformer, Prototype? Perhaps not, but it still has one: a tale of memories sucked out of brains the hard way, and New York City as an evolving character. It’s explained below the cut, and it might just surprise us with phrases like “the buildings themselves become infected.” The story trailer also suggests that there’s some level of interactivity in piecing together the protagonist’s memories, as well as introducing two new characters: Alex’s sister, and a helpful pathologist. Thanks, Pathologist.
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I just want to echo John’s sentiments regarding Alpha Protocol: the forthcoming modern-day spy RPG really could end up being one of the most accomplished games this year. Real-time combat mechanics, branching dialogue trees, hub-structure environments and missions, statistics-led character progression: all set in the real world. SEGA seem to have given Obsidian plenty of time and freedom to develop this, and we’ll definitely be looking at it more closely as it approaches the October release date. Anyway, two videos from Obsidian sit below the cut, and they’re crammed with game footage. Go take a look.

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Sitting down to play an early version of Red Faction on an almost-sunny London day, I do get a moment’s cognitive dissonance when I think of myself here, at a corporate event, playing a multi-million dollar product of capitalism designed to simulate the thrill of armed insurrection, when I could just head across town and get involved in the real thing. Except if I did that, I’d probably get in more trouble when I hit someone with a sledgehammer. And I wouldn’t get to play with nanite-disolverers. Or, at least, I don’t think I would. Man!

So – Red Faction then.
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Jim tried valiantly to get us all to play this back in December, but unfortunately I suffer from a rare, tragic medical condition that means it takes at least three months to react to anything anyone says to me. Waitaminnit, Obama’s president? And the Beatles have split? Man!
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The GDC trailer for the latest version of the Unreal Engine isn’t exactly dynamite, but there’s one really interesting feature: the Master Control Program. This sinister-sounding application allows designers to precisely analyse activity within their maps – just as we saw Bungie do in their Halo level design chatter last year. I think it’s an interesting glimpse into where game design tools are heading, and the kind of meta-data that game designers can now rely on when they’re working with tech as sophisticated as this. A similar story of real world environment-use design came up when talking to the BLDGBLOG author recently, but I’ll link to that particular brain-dump when it goes live.
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We’ve been following streamlined hack-n-slash Kivi’s Underworld since it was first announced, through into beta, and then… Well, like the brain-free wrongminds we so often are, we forgot to tell you when it launched its demo. Fortunately we’re making up for all that now, as a revised demo has been released, and we’re posting about it right now.

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The British can have gamejams too! Microsoft organised one last month at the University of Derby, with students and indie gaming types convening to bash out some 48hr game prototypes in XNA. The games, as well as stacks of video diaries, can be found here. They all have the theme “evolution” and there’s a strong whiff of early-stage Spore about them. Unfortunately, for now at least, you need all this nonsense installed to get them working. (I surprised myself by having all this stuff installed already, presumably from judging IGF games.) Apparently a Microsoft volunteer will soon be rebuilding the X48 games to make the titles more immediately executable on your PC. Congratulations to all those involved, and we look forward to seeing output from the next one.